Paris Mayor Swims in Beautified Seine Ahead of Olympic Games

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Paris Mayor Swims in Beautified Seine Ahead of Olympic Games

After multiple delays caused by a combination of torrential rain and torrid domestic politics, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, took to the cleaned-up waters of the Seine on Wednesday, fulfilling a promise that has become a symbol of the Paris Olympics.

With the Games just nine days away, on the kind of perfect Paris morning that inspires wonder, Ms. Hidalgo, a socialist who has pursued the ecological transformation of the city, stepped down into the murky river that will be a focal point of the Olympics.

A vast engineering project, costing some $1.5 billion over the past several years, has stanched the flow of sewage and industrial waste into the Seine. The result is a river that is clean enough for several Olympic events — including the triathlon and two 10-kilometer swimming events — to be held in it and for the opening ceremony involving a flotilla of boats carrying thousands of athletes to take place on it.

As crowds looked on from the riverbanks and bridges, Ms. Hidalgo, 65, in goggles and a ****** wet suit, swam the crawl rapidly downstream, accompanied by Tony Estanguet, head of the Paris Olympics Committee and a three-time Olympic gold medalist as a slalom canoeist.

After much rain in the past two months, the river is still flowing at about three times its normal speed.

Ms. Hidalgo’s initial plan to swim on June 23 was postponed because of the level of the river and the bacteria in it. The swim was put back to June 30. But that idea was blown out of the water by President Emmanuel Macron’s surprise move to hold snap parliamentary elections that day — a decision Ms. Hidalgo deplored. “Why ruin this beautiful moment?” she said, alluding to how the vote would encroach on the Olympics.

Mr. Macron, who was invited and had indicated he might swim in the river at some point, was a notable absentee on Wednesday.

The aftershocks of the inconclusive election have not abated. After the government’s resignation on Tuesday, which he accepted, Mr. Macron asked it to stay on in a caretaker capacity. This means that a France in political limbo will host the first Olympics held in Paris since 1924.

Ms. Hidalgo and Mr. Estanguet, accompanied by Marc Guillaume, the top government official for the Paris region, were all smiles during their brief swim and after they came ashore.

“Perhaps this kind of madness is particularly French,” Mr. Estanguet said. “We like to move the boundaries.”

There is, it seems, a grandiose folly to the idea of making the Seine the center of a citywide stadium, with Olympic events being held at many of the city’s landmarks, including the Grand Palais, the Place de la Concorde and beside the Eiffel Tower. But behind the plan has lain a serious ambition: to make the Games as close to carbon neutral as possible by using the existing city rather than building a series of new stadiums that then stand empty.

Swimming was banned in the Seine in 1923. Ms. Hidalgo’s plan is for the river to be used not merely for a handful of Olympic events but also, from next year, for public swimming at a few locations.

Bleachers now line the Seine, and more are going up. Many bridges are closed. Roads and sidewalks are fenced off as security concerns run high for the opening ceremony. Some residents will soon need police-issued QR codes to reach their own apartments. Paris, for the moment, has emptied out as residents flee what some regard as a life-complicating takeover of their city.

In the current French climate, even a swim is political. The sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who is from Mr. Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, tried to one-up Ms. Hidalgo last weekend by plunging unexpectedly into the river.

As a stunt it went well, with images of the minister’s swim

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. But Ms. Hidalgo, who is well to the political left of Ms. Oudéa-Castéra, was pointedly silent. The two women are known to have a relationship of cordial mutual loathing, which has not improved over the past week.

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